Personal Details about Roedy Green

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Roedy Green
taken 2008-05-24

Roedy Green is an independent computer consultant with
53 years
experience available for speaking, consulting or contract programming work on
socially significant projects involving Java, Abundance, Assembler or the
Internet.

I am a big guy 6’2½”, with a bellowing, alarming voice, born
1948-02-04, with hair like Doc in Back To The
Future, only brown. I have a clumsy lurching gate caused by neuropathy and back
trouble. I feel embarrassed about my appearance and so usually avoid appearing in
public.

marital status: attached but not married.

name on birth certificate: Munroe Frederic Compton Green.

nickname: Roedy which rhymes with Cody, pronounced Rho-Dee
accent on the first syllable. This is a nickname derived from Munroe, my
school days name.

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transcript

nome de plume: Gaius. Gaius speaks for planet earth, through me as a channel and
translator. Transcribing Gaius’s thoughts is much like playing charades. The name
Gaius is rich with associations in the Pagan, Roman and Christian
traditions.

Rates

I usually work on a fixed price for a contract. The price
depends on how long I think it will take and how interesting I think the work will be,
how useful I think the work will be to the planet and how busy I am. I am happiest to
tackle small challenging problems, the parts of a project you can’t solve yourself.
I ask for half the money up front and half on completion to your satisfaction. All bug
fixes are included, no matter when they are discovered and get top priority. You can pay
by PayPal to my email account, or by cheque. Sorry I no longer accept
credit cards.

I also work on a hourly basis for consulting, brainstorming, coaching, trouble
shooting etc. Again, there my rate is based on your ability to pay and how valuable the
work is to the planet. I usually charge charities
$25.00 CAD
per hour, individuals
$50.00 USD
per hour and businesses
$60.00 USD
per hour.

Interests

Planetary consciousness — think globally, act
locally. Optimize globally. Plants and animals have just as much right to the planet as
humans. Man is the caretaker of earth, not its master. We must reduce the number of
humans without resorting to war, pestilence or violence.

This includes in roughly descending order: Ending the Iraq war. Removing Republicans
from power. Protecting the environment. Fair treatment of the third world. Relaxing the
taboos that are holding our populations too high. Communication with cetacea and other
animals including humans. Pranging (highly unexpected stunts that break people’s conditioned patterns
or addictions. Ideally they make people temporarily question reality.). Writing essays. Frogs. Africa. Tropical reefs.

My whole life, starting in childhood has been mainly about various causes: in roughly
the chronological order they came to my attention:

Wrote an article in ’86 October Byte Magazine on Abundance. It is a computer
language that can jaunt (run forward and backward in time). Its philosophy is radically
different from the mainstream. You can download the public domain compiler.

Wrote the public domain BBL (Big Black Lady) (Big Black Lady) 32-bit Forth
compiler. JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) told me they used it as a base for their compiler to
control unmanned space craft.

Worked with John Lilly at the Human Dolphin Foundation. Wrote an electronic
Etch-A-Sketch controlled by delphinic whistles. Took dolphins on their first tour of
the human world using a video camera and underwater video monitor. Worked on project
Janus. Present at the first experiment in 1979-11. Swimming
with the dolphins was something else. This is not how I did it, but you could
try any number of places to arrange a swim.

Wrote Optow — a program that designed most of the transmission lines in BC
and Brazil. It was the first time I discovered the whole was more than the sum of its
parts. It had a style and personality that I had no intention of programming in — it just
emerged out of the low level detail.

The idea of Dvorak is the most common characters are in your home row and the
least common in the bottom row. I could not touch type QWERTY without severe wrist
pain. With DSK (Dvorak Standard Keyboard) I can type for hours a day at up to 100WPM (Words Per Minute)
8CPS (Characters Per Second)
without discomfort.

IBM (International Business Machines) told me that I was at one point the youngest computer
programmer in the world. This was back in the days when having access to the white coat
and locked computer rooms was like being a child astronaut.

wants to learn new languages including Esperanto, Chinese, Tagalog, Bahasa
Indonesia, Arabic and an African language. I am most interested in grammar and how
language determines what you can think.

Past president of Apples BC.

I was known across Canada for my monthly column in The Computer Paper
in the early days of personal computers explaining the technology in layman’s
terms.

CMP (Canadian Mind Products) used to
manufacture custom computers and custom software. Some of the more interesting projects
were reverse engineering the controls at Woodwards Department stores replacing an
IBM
Series/1 mini with an AT (Advanced Technology) to schedule
the lights and fans, writing a program to match lost and found cats for the Humane
Society, managing bond sales for the State of Israel, managing financial records for
Talmud Torah School and tracking all the testing and licensing of all 120,000 liquor
servers in BC. Mostly though we did donation tracking systems for charities.
CMP
now is more involved with the human biocomputer.

I used to co-chair the Q&A session each month at VPCUS (Vancouver Personal Computer User Society).

In 1985 I had a conversation with the head of Tata, the
General Motors of India. He was Gandhi’s godson. we talked about Gandhi. We also
talked about India’s future as a software giant. He later left me to explore his
private museum of Gandhi memorabilia. Since then, Tata has become a software giant in
its own right. I like to think my ebullient conversation about India’s future
helped give him confidence to pursue that tack.

In 1995 I started the notes for the Java glossary. It has since grown to a useful resource
to the entire planet to learn Java.

Starting in 2000, I started writing about American
politics, the crooked election, 9/11 and the Iraq war,
attempting to derail the Nazification of America. If my work cuts the war short by even
a day, I have not lived in vain.

Loves

Inspiring people to take a stand for planetary consciousness,
giving massages, hearing about people’s human relationship problems, The Royal
Canadian Air Farce, Bach, Wendy
Carlos, African music, Caribbean music, clean air, clean water, consciousness
workshops, new efficient, secure computer architectures and new computer languages that
make life easy for both programmer and user.

People I Would Most Like To Meet I Have Not Met Yet

Formal Education

I started my first year at Malvern House, a
British-style Christian boarding school in Victoria BC. That’s probably where I
picked up my slight English accent and schizophrenic attitude toward religion. I attended
elementary school in West Vancouver at Cedardale for grades 2 and 3 then later Westcott
for grades 4 through 6. I attended Hillside secondary and later West Van High. I was
always the first, second or third student in my class in all subjects except physical
education. I started school a year early, then later went on an accelerated program, so I
graduated from grade 12 two years early. I went to
UBC (University of British Columbia) and studied honours chemistry and mathematics. I got a BSc
in Math in 1968. I took all the courses for my Masters degree,
but gradually lost interest in mathematics because it was so far removed from practical
application and because I had an exploding interest in computers and gay lib. I never
did write a thesis. I fantasize I will receive a posthumous honorary doctoral degree for
some of my work such as Abundance,
SCID (Source Code In Database), or quantum theory.

Dash 30 Dash

The -30- at the end of my
posts is a newspaper convention meaning the end. If you have
a listing, it confirms all was printed properly. In a modem transmission it confirms
nothing was chopped off. I picked up the habit originally from newspaper editor friend of
mine. I have heard many different explanations about how the convention got started:

In longhand news stories, authors used X to indicate the end of a sentence, XX for
a paragraph end and XXX for story end. XXX is the Roman numeral for 30.

The maximum length of slugs that a typesetting machine could cast was 30 ems, so 30
meant the end of a line at story end, to separate it from next story.

According to one story, the convention originally started back in the 1920s or 30s as a solidarity signal requesting
a raise to $30.

Supposedly, the first telegraph (in the Civil War) to a press association, was 30
words and the sender ended it with that number, the word goodnight and his
name and the 30 stuck.

The maximum number of messages each member of the Associated Press could send was
30 and this marked a quota.

Some claim a reporter named Thirtee sent a story with his name and the operator
changed it to a number.

The Backyardigans

Oddly one of my favourite TV Shows is targeted at pre-schoolers. I still have a
television, but I canceled HDTV (High Definition Television)
cable service, disgusted with the overall quality of programming. It is called
The
Backyardigans. It is about five cartoon animals, Tyrone a laid-back moose,
Austin a shy kangaroo, Pablo an excitable penguin, Uniqua a feminist pink spotted animal,
and Tasha a slightly bossy yellow hippopotamus. They have adventures of imagination in
their common backyard. Watching this show puts a huge smile on my face and a generates a
gentle euphoria. Part of what pleases is that I thoroughly approve of this show to
indoctrinate the young. Its characters are curious, kind, considerate, positive and
supportive — excellent rôle models. Each episode highlights a different
musical genre with amusing original singable songs, a song parody and some simple dances.
The 3D animation is smooth and at times super real, e.g. moving water, or tiny horses,
with plenty of loving detail. The actors who do the voices are reasonably accomplished
child singers. This show does not patronise kids with silly, pretending-to-be-stupid,
shrill adults masquerading as children.

Links

Family and Friends

I don’t talk much about my family and
friends because of the death threats against them. I don’t want to make it easy for
nutcases angry at me to hassle them. I am the eldest of five children. I have three
younger sisters and a younger brother. I have relatives across Canada, in the USA and in
New Zealand. My nephew is a local TV star. They are a very supportive bunch. Both my
parents and all my grandparents are dead. Dad was in charge of all electric power
generation in the province for many years. My Mom founded North America’s first
food bank called the Free Food Stall. My dad’s father was the Surveyor General. If
you got back far enough, there was a female ancestor with a major rôle in the
French revolution, so I came by my rabble rousing honestly. My nephew is actor Torrance Coombs, (or Tory as I call him),
who starred as Juniper/John Doe in JPod and as Thomas Culpeper in The Tutors, a British
historical drama. He is in Ireland filming five episodes in 2009-06 through 2009-08.

It is not important that you agree, but that you think the issues on
this website through for yourself. I’m often wrong and I’m eager to hear the
correct answers.

Spelling

I am Canadian, so I naturally use ou spellings like
honour. People still mistake me as American, so I have affected
some ise rather than ize British spellings as well to
emphasise that I am not American.